A senior official with Slobodan Milosevic’s party said this evening that he was "99 per cent" certain that the former Yugoslav President's funeral would be held in Moscow.

Ivica Dacic, deputy chief of the Serbian Socialist Party, told Associated Press that the decision followed lengthy talks between party leaders and Milosevic's family.

BK, Belgrade’s private television station, reported that Mira Markovic, Milosevic’s widow, had opted for the Russian capital because an "adequate" burial location could not be found in Belgrade. It was reported that the city's mayor had blocked an application for her husband's body to be interred in the Avenue of Heroes, instead offering a piece of land hidden at the back of the city's main cemetery.

The announcement came several hours after a Belgrade court suspended a warrant for the arrest of Mrs Markovic, who lives in exile in Moscow, which would have allowed her to attend a funeral in Serbia. It was suggested that Mrs Markovic would nonetheless have been wary about setting foot on Serbian soil, where she is wanted on charges of abuse of office during her husband's 13-year premiership.

Milosevic's son, Marko, collected his father's body from the Hague this morning. His entourage included a team of Russian doctors who intend to challenge Dutch pathologists over their post-mortem finding that the Serbian leader had died of a heart attack.

Milosevic, 64, was found dead in his cell at a UN prison near The Hague on Saturday morning. He had been in detention since 2001 and spent the last four years defending himself against 66 charges of genocide and other war crimes arising from the conflicts in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo.

The day before his death Milosevic had written to the Russian Foreign Ministry claiming that he was being poisoned and appealing for protection and emergency treatment in Moscow. Judges at the UN tribunal had refused to let him travel, fearing that he would never return.

But a Dutch toxicologist who analysed Milosevic's blood two weeks ago said that he had been taking an unprescribed antibiotic to neutralise the drugs he was being given for a heart condition - and that accusation was repeated today by Carla del Ponte, chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.

After flying into Amsterdam's Schiphol airport on an Aeroflot flight from Moscow, Marko Milosevic told reporters: "He got killed, he didn’t die. He got killed. There is a murder."

A spokesman for the Dutch Forensic Institute where Milosevic's post-mortem was carried out said that it had agreed to receive four Russian doctors travelling with Marko Milosevic. "We have agreed to a visit," he said. "They wanted to be informed of the methods we used and the toxicological analysis."

As Marko arrived in the Netherlands, judges at the International Criminal Tribunal formally closed their file on Milosevic. After four years, Milosevic had been expected to wrap up his defence case in the next few weeks, but today's final hearing in the case lasted just a few minutes.

"The trial chamber has been advised of the death of the accused, Slobodan Milosevic," said the chief judge Patrick Robinson, who had clashed repeatedly with Milosevic. "His death terminates these proceedings."